When I get to the last one, my chest tightens and I know for a fact what I’ve known for the past few minutes. The card from the Dawsons is no longer here. Mum must have taken it out.

It wasn’t just the kissing, although that’s how it started. It was other things, too. We couldn’t stop ourselves.

“It isn’t wrong,” she told me. “You know that, right?” And I did. I did know that. But somehow it felt wrong. Just like that first dare had felt wrong.

But as time went by, we forgot all about it. It was just me and her. The two of us. Behind the closed door of her bedroom with the chair pushed against it and the curtains pulled tight.

It was just us, and what we did.

The rest of the time, at home with our families, at school, it was like it wasn’t happening. We talked about other people we fancied, other lives we would live. As if what happened behind that closed door was completely separate. A world in itself. Another dimension.

Sometimes, when we weren’t in that room, I wondered whether that world existed at all, or whether it was all one of my more elaborate daydreams. But at other times, it was more real than anything else I had ever experienced.

It was the only world that mattered.

33

It’s Monday morning and Ross has just driven to work. We didn’t get back from Mum and Dad’s till late last night. We talked about my discovery for almost the entire journey home. Ross thinks I need to let it go.

Ross reminds me of my dad sometimes, not wanting to go too deep into the whys and wherefores, preferring to let sleeping dogs lie. Perhaps it’s true, what psychologists say, that women are invariably attracted to men who are versions of their fathers. He thinks my parents have a right to keep aspects of their past lives to themselves, and though I agree with him in principle, I can’t let it go. I can’t. My curiosity has been fired up and I need answers.

I have to ring Mum. And I have to do it now.

—

“Mum, did you hear what I said?” My voice has started to tremble.

The silence on the other end of the phone is glacial.

“Yes,” she says at last.

“I know I should have asked you first, but it isn’t as if I haven’t looked in there before.”

She still hasn’t answered my question, so I try again. “Why haven’t you ever told me that you and Sheena Dawson used to be friends?”

She takes a deep breath and exhales. “Because there was nothing to tell. We used to know each other for a little while, but we didn’t keep in touch.”

“But, when Alice and I became friends, why didn’t you—”